Choose your own review/for hard determinists

19 May 2024 - 25 Aug 2025
Open in Logseq
    • You do not believe in free will, given the nature of objective reality

      • You observe that minds are embodied and subject to the constraints and fates of physical objects. Rocks, machines, organisms, brains, and mind, all operate on strict causal laws in which whatever happens at time t was determined by the state of the world at time t-1. In a certain sense there are no real agents, no unmoved movers. All is a seamless web of cause and effect.
      • You are a hard-nosed realist, you feel in fact that you see the truth and have a responsibility to convey that truth to your fellow primates. You did not choose to feel this way, any more than you made any other choices.
      • The dangers of this view is a total and corrosive nihilism. Nothing really matters, there are no choices to be made, and whether you work for the betterment of mankind or kill yourself makes little difference and is preordained anyway. People as agents don't exist, and all talk of values, morality, and choice is just a persistent illusion (possibly a necessary illusion, but you don't let that stop you).
      • Hypocrisy
        • And since you are a human being with all the responsibilities it entails, you act like you have choices. It would be rude, a failing, not to. It wouldn't be your fault, exactly, but other people would certainly think less of you, and that would feel unpleasant.
      • Determinism would seem to explode almost any notion of morality. It literally gives everybody a universal excuse for any kind of bad behavior -- they can't help it, nobody can help anything.
      • I suppose there is something liberating in this view of life. It forgives all, it achieves what religion is supposed to achieve, salvation. Even at the cost of our identity aa real agents. The very notion of sin and guilt turn out to be nonsensical. We can un-eat the fatal apple that Eve took from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and go back to something else, or forward to a world beyond freedom and dignity, in Skinner's terms.